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There are some great new features in the 1Password for iOS 6.2 update that hit the App Store last week. One of them is that we’ve added Watchtower (a feature that has been available on Mac and Windows for some time now) to 1Password for iOS.

Watchtower warns you if a site or service has been compromised in a way that would make it a good idea for you to change your password for that site. Watchtower in 1Password looks at the most recent time a password change was recommended for a site and it looks at the time that your password for an item was last modified. If, like Molly (one of my dogs), you haven’t updated your Adobe password since the 2014 breach, you might see something like this:

Molly hasn’t changed her Adobe password since the breach a couple of years back

Preserving your privacy

I want to talk about a far less visible feature of Watchtower: We’ve added Watchtower support in a way that still preserves your privacy. We don’t want to know what sites and services you have in your 1Password vaults, so when 1Password checks to see if one of your Logins is listed in Watchtower, it does not make a query to our servers asking about it.

Turning on Watchtower in iOS. “Your website information is never transmitted to the 1Password Watchtower service.”

Querying Watchtower without querying you

Our Watchtower people are continually watching reports of site breaches and updating our database of such sites regularly. This is how 1Password knows that a password change is recommended for some site.

The “obvious” way for 1Password on your computer (and now iOS device) to alert you, would be to go through your 1Password items and ask our database on some server about the status of those items. The problem with this “obvious” way of doing things is that it means that any server your copy of 1Password queries would then be able to know your IP address and what sites you have in your 1Password data.

If 1Password on some device were to ask our server, “Do you have Watchtower information about ISecretlyHateStarWars.org?” then our server will know that someone at your Internet address may have a very nasty secret. You certainly wouldn’t like us to know such things about you, and we don’t want to know such things either.

The road less travelled

So we don’t do things the obvious way. Instead, we send the same stripped down version of our Watchtower database to everyone who turns on the feature. You have a local copy of the Watchtower data on your device, and 1Password just checks against that copy of the local data. All we can know (if we chose to log such information) is which IP addresses have enabled Watchtower. We are never in a position to know what sites you have in your 1Password data.

Baked-in privacy

It may take a bit of extra work from us to design Watchtower in a way that preserves your privacy, but we think it is worth it.

Your privacy must be protected by more than mere policy (a set of rules we make on how we behave with respect to data about you); instead, we aim to bake privacy protection into the very structure of what we build. We design 1Password in a way that would make it hard for us to violate your privacy.

You can read more about this approach to privacy in our support article, Private by Design.

Of all of the revelations about the NSA that began in June and continue to this day, the one that has shocked me the most is the fact that the United States National Security Agency has been deliberately inserting weaknesses into security products and even into NIST standards. In light of this, it is fit and proper for anyone who relies on 1Password for their security and privacy to ask whether 1Password has been, or could be, tampered with to deliberately weaken it.

The easy questions

Has 1Password been deliberately weakened?

No.

Have we, AgileBits, ever been asked/compelled/pressured/contacted by any entity asking us to weaken 1Password?

No.

Could we be compelled to weaken 1Password or allow for the weakening of 1Password?

Not without substantial risk that such attempt would become public.

Those questions are the easy ones to answer. The harder question is why you should believe those answers.

Why should you believe us

It is impossible to absolutely prove that our answers to the easy questions above are truthful. But what I can do is provide a number of more verifiable claims, each of which makes it harder for us to lie about any of this. In combination, these should be enough to persuade you that there is no backdoor (deliberate weakness) in 1Password and that it would be very unlikely for one to be introduced.

They can’t gag all of us

We have developers in four separate countries: Canada (AgileBits is a Canadian company), the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. The gag orders that accompany National Security Letters in the US would not bind non-US citizens outside of the US. Likewise the Canadian, British, or Dutch analogues to National Security Letters wouldn’t bind US citizens. To compel all of us to betray our customers and principles, they would need to coordinate that legal compulsion in four jurisdictions.

This doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility of such a set of gag orders, but it does make such compelled silence much harder to achieve. This also doesn’t rule out other avenues of attack. In particular, could just one or two people within AgileBits sneak in a backdoor? We’ll talk about that below, but note that the inability to gag so many of us means that a backdoor would have to remain unknown to most of us.

Our lack of data collection is verifiable

Your 1Password data is under your control. Out of the box, 1Password creates a local data file (your “vault”) and sync is disabled. We never have the opportunity to see your Master Password or even your encrypted 1Password data. 1Password not only gives you “end-to-end” encryption, but our overall design means that we are never in a position to turn over or intercept your data. We simply never see it in any form whatsoever.

Furthermore, we never see how you use 1Password. We don’t know what sites you log into, we don’t know how many 1Password items you have. Indeed, we don’t even know whether you use 1Password or not. We offer a soon-to-be-incremented number of data synchronization methods, none of which involve us ever having the opportunity to intercept your data. When 1Password 4 for Mac arrives soon, Wi-Fi sync (currently in testing) will allow you to sync locally, meaning your data never has to leave your local network.

You can monitor 1Password network activity for yourself to confirm that your data, even encrypted, is never sent to us. All of this dramatically reduces where a backdoor could be inserted. Indeed, it eliminates the otherwise easiest to insert and most difficult to detect backdoors. So an entire range of attacks is already off the table.

As always, this doesn’t rule out all kinds of mischief, but it substantially limits the scope and opportunity for an attack.

This doesn’t rule out every kind of sabotage that could be done, but it does rule out a broad range of some of the easiest lines of attack. Because this limits where a weakness could be introduced, it’s harder for a deliberate weakness to be introduced that isn’t noticed by others who can access the source code.

As a consequence of this, everyone with access to the source code knows where to look for possible tampering. This makes it harder for a backdoor to be introduced without it being noticed by many of us. As pointed out above, they can’t gag us all.

Lavabit has set a precedent

One company, Lavabit, has shut itself down rather than comply with betraying their customers. This increases the risk of discovery to those trying to compel developers to introduce weaknesses.

It is impossible to predict how we would react in absence of having the full details of such compulsion in front of us; there are just too many unknowns and too many forms of compulsion. But the very real possibility that we would shut ourselves down (which would be public) rather than sabotage what we do and love should act as some deterrent to those who might wish to compel us to introduce a backdoor.

Only communications tools appear to be targeted

From the most recent revelations, the targets appear to be communication tools and protocols. 1Password is not such a tool. This doesn’t mean that the NSA couldn’t change their focus, but from what we know so far, 1Password is not the kind of thing they are after.

Going around crypto instead of through it

Even if you don’t find any of the individual reasons listed above to be persuasive, they interact powerfully. In combination, they make it much harder to get a weakness into 1Password without taking on large risks of getting caught and failing. Any attacker, including the NSA, will avoid high risk, high cost attacks if there are safer and easier alternatives. I’m therefore confident that the NSA would rather go around 1Password than through it.

Crypto Wars II

In the 1990s, there was a series of debates, pressure, civil disobedience, and cryptographic developments that have come to be known as “The Crypto Wars”. At the heart of this was the US and other governments’ efforts to prevent people from having access to cryptographic tools which those governments couldn’t break. In the end, governments (seemingly) surrendered, in large part because the tools they wished to use to enforce those restrictions (export restrictions, the Clipper Chip) just weren’t going to work.

What the 5 September, 2013 revelations show is that the US government has taken a different tack. The Crypto Wars may never have ended. Instead of explicitly and openly trying to limit the power of the cryptographic tools allowed to the public, they are now surreptitiously sabotaging the tools that we all use. As before, this will be fought on the political front—people telling their representatives that they don’t want hobbled security tools—and on the technological front—building better, stronger, more robust and verifiable systems.

Our role in this as a company is to be transparent about our approach to security while keeping your 1Password data protected.

On Tuesday, an offshoot of Anonymous, called AntiSec, claimed to have purloined a list of 12 million iOS unique device identifiers, or UDIDs, along with various bits of user data connected to those UDIDs. While the revelation raised the specter of privacy violations, it became clear that users have plenty of questions about what kind of information can and cannot be gleaned from one’s iPhone or iPad UDID. Here, we explain what exactly a UDID is, how it is used, why Apple deprecated its use by developers, and why the privacy fears aren’t entirely unfounded.